12.12.2014 - Open Standards and Open Source in the Mobile-Cloud Era

Having been a part of industry standards for over 20 years, I am able to see the changing landscape of Open Standards and Open Source in the new Mobile-Cloud era. The shifts in the role standards and open source are playing today are much different from what it was 20 years ago. They have been evolving to accelerate innovation and interoperability in this time of our ever increasing dependence on information technology. In 1994 (20 years ago) during the Client-Server era, AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe were providers delivering dialup services to consumers. These were mostly isolated repositories of information with very little interoperability. At that same time, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was established to standardize HTML and an HTTP working group was established in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). HTTP had been around since 1991, In the end it took both open standards and several open source projects to make the Web a reality, including the creation of HTTP and HTML standards as well as several open source projects for that created the HTTP servers and web browsers. Fast forward 20 years and we see a very different world with processors that are thousands of times faster, continuing reductions in cost per cycle, along with [...]]>...